News (23/5/2015)

Finally some news. It’s been a month again, so what happened in the meantime?

My Wacom Companion stopped charging, I had to send it to Germany to have it repaired and couldn’t continue working on the comic. I later got it back, made a comic page and the issue happened again, so I sent it to be repaired few days ago. I am working with my old Intuos now, it doesn’t feel the same at all and I can’t produce decent line art. So I guess that I will again just make pencil sketches or environmental practice until I got the Companion back. I don’t like being limited to working just on one device to be able to produce comic page, so I am thinking through changing my comic page process.

I was able to re-new my pencil skills, so I could always do a pencil line art and colour it with whatever device is available. But the problem is that I’ve been travelling a lot and I am not near any scanner most of the time. (That is why Companion was super useful.) I found a new great process of making sketches – sketching in the computer, printing it out with soft blue lines, drawing over it with a pencil, scanning it, and then erasing the sketch layer with some correction filters. It is super great for making a nice compositions, and it would be wonderful for comic making (since I would be able to leave enough blank space for the bubbles, prepare correct perspective etc.), but the problem is that I need not only scanner for that, but also a printer. *sigh* It would be much easier if I didn’t have to travel so much.

What other thing I wanted to change was the comic updates. Since I have so much trouble with finishing the pages in full scale of them, I was thinking about uploading them frame by frame more often. It sounds terrible, I know, but it wouldn’t be so bad, you will see. At least – more frequent updates. Yay?

Anyway, I am going through an exam period at my school, which doesn’t mean that I have more time for drawing. But I am super angry, that I have to spend so much time at my school tasks, learning for the 17 subjects I have to pass, etc. So it makes me do other staff for myself and the comic. I was thinking about writing down more world building stuff. I’ve been working on the world of Aeltarnen since 2000 (unbelievable isn’t it?) and starting the first version of the comic in 2003. So I have a lot of things that I like about the world and the characters that couldn’t be shown in the comic. And other people can learn them only through playing an RP with me or from my stories (and there hasn’t been much of them that I would translate into English) or from the Aeltarnen Wiki (still not finished and unreleased). That made me to think about releasing some posts about the world and minor characters from time to time. They will be here in the blog and I guess that I will post them also on my Patreon and on the Aeltarnen tumblr.

Or on my other tumblr blogs… I wish I hadn’t been so organised. Ehm. What tumblr blogs I actually have?

What else happened during the last month – I wrote script for another comic. It will be released probably after I finish the chapter 2 The Bandits. It’s not about Mortifer or Salm, but some other heroes who will be involved in the Aeltarnen’s story later. I’ve already finished he cover, but you will see it later. (…and there are some sketches from the story on my patreon for the subscribers.)

Okay, that’s enough of making a wall of text. Thanks for reading!

Finally some pictures from the last month:

I made some more sketches:

Some chibies:

Some black pencil sketches:

Some random images:

And of course more sketchy images:

And then I discovered the technique with printed sketch, so it became even better:

I made some elven portraits:

And chibis (that’s what oveload with school work does with me):

I practiced painting environments and working with colours:

And of course I made a tumblr giveaway:

And the images for the winners:

So many images. In case you want to see sketches for most of them, subscribe to my patreon. Drawing daily is challenging, and one doesn’t feel improving at all, but when I look back at my art from previous years, the improvement is here. So I strongly recommend it 🙂